Unsparing glimpses of the Stasi’s operations and life in the DDR.

The approaching 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, on Nov. 9, has stirred renewed debate in this country about just how harshly East Germany should be judged. One recent public-affairs show asked whether the defunct nation should be remembered primarily as a Heimat, a homeland, or as an Unrechtsstaat, a politically loaded term denoting a lawless, illegitimate state.

Two guests on the show, East Germany’s final interior minister and a popular singer, advanced the Heimat argument, suggesting that, while mistakes were made, many East Germans cherished aspects of their lives. For two others, a journalist separated from his mother by the wall and a woman imprisoned after her husband had informed on her to the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), East Germany was a tyranny unworthy of nostalgia or respect.

Grappling with these still-unsettled questions poses a special challenge for museums. But it also allows for an exciting immediacy: Stasi prison tours led by former inmates, open houses at onetime Stasi offices, oral histories by survivors of the regime’s brutality and oppression.

In Berlin, the DDR Museum and the Museum at the Kulturbrauerei both attempt warts-and-all portrayals of East German society. Their content—including exhibits on consumer goods and housing shortages, political indoctrination, dissent and the national security apparatus—naturally overlaps. Both stress the meagerness of public support for the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and its hated Stasi enforcers.

But the tone of the labels differs, as does the visitor experience. To some extent, the DDR Museum is a victim of its popularity, with tourists crowding the tight gallery spaces and enduring long lines for a simulated ride in a Trabi, East Germany’s signature, hard-to-obtain car. It calls itself “one of the most interactive museums in the world.” And while many exhibits are low-tech—drawers that slide open and heavy panels visitors must lift—the interactive games are genuinely inventive. One lays out the dilemmas faced by voters in rigged elections, including whether to raise Stasi hackles by insisting on a secret ballot.

The museum documents some of the fissures that opened between state and society. We learn that, in a not-so-modest stab at rebellion, four out of five East Germans frequented nude beaches despite a government ban; a wall of explicit photographs illustrates the point. Elsewhere, the texts dip into sarcasm, suggesting, for example, that in the centralized economy, “the only commodity produced efficiently was hot air.”

Playing cards made by inmates out of cigarette packets.
Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial / Luise Wagener

With its larger spaces and more modest crowds, “Everyday Life in the GDR” at the Museum at the Kulturbrauerei is easier to visit. It examines the tension between political propaganda and economic realities, and lauds the resourcefulness of individuals who carved out zones of privacy, alternative culture and quiet dissent. The Trabi in this show has a tent on its roof, symbolizing creativity, enterprise and escape into nature.

The immersive exhibition design evokes the gray, behind-the-times aura of East Germany: its sparsely stocked shops; the antiquated fashions; the stark yet sought-after new housing developments. Residents relied on the black market and on care packages from the other Germany (“Better an aunt in the West than an uncle in the Politburo,” they quipped).

Cementing the regime’s power was the Stasi, modeled on the Soviet Cheka, or secret police. Several sites around Germany now specifically commemorate the so-called shield and sword of the Party. With Berlin’s Stasi Museum closed until Jan. 15, 2015, two excellent alternatives are the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, at the former Stasi remand prison, and “Stasi. The Exhibition on the GDR’s State Security.”

The latter, in the education center of Berlin’s Stasi Records Agency, is a sober, compact overview of Stasi operations. Organized thematically, it features surveillance film and documents from Stasi archives, as well as biographies of six surveillance targets. One case study is of an 18-year-old dissident, Hermann Josef Flade, whose 1951 death sentence was commuted after widespread demonstrations.

By establishing the extent of the Stasi’s intrusion into private life, the exhibition challenges nostalgic visions of East German society. The organization spied on, harassed and sometimes arrested artists, athletes, musicians, writers, even church leaders—anyone who might harbor dissenting views or try to defect.

In the 1970s, as East Germany sought international respectability, the Stasi’s violent methods gave way to “soft” ones—primarily surveillance and “psychic demolition.” Sowing an atmosphere of paranoia, agents opened mail, tapped phones, bugged homes and secretly filmed suspects. By 1989, the eve of its dissolution, the Stasi had 91,000 full-time employees and a network of 189,000 informers, motivated by patriotism, ambition, money or fear. Its grim, bureaucratic legacy was a mind-numbing 39 million file cards, 1.4 million photographs, and 34,000 film and sound documents.

The true terrors of the system are palpable at Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, a Stasi prison that is now an impressive memorial, with tours by former inmates and a comprehensive exhibition.

Wolfgang Rüddenklau, my guide, was imprisoned here briefly in 1987 for his involvement with subversive publications. Sporting a wild white beard and carrying a cup of tea, he led the group through subterranean corridors and into tiny cells. Along the way, he described the prison’s history and Stasi methods of torturing, isolating, disorienting and interrogating prisoners. In the early days, inmates were forced to stand in water, were deprived of sleep and were permitted showers only once every two weeks. Conditions improved over time, and prisoners who confessed to crimes, real or imagined, won special privileges.

Mr. Rüddenklau told a prison joke that conveyed the inmates’ disdain for their tormentors: Three men, one of them a Stasi agent, bet on who will be the first to catch a wild pig. The Stasi agent wins—he catches a rabbit and forces it to confess to being a pig.

In the smartly designed exhibition, the inmate experience is captured in oral histories and in artifacts such as a straitjacket, a photo of a prisoner trying to meditate in an interrogation room, a set of playing cards fashioned from cigarette packs and tiny figures of wire and wool exchanged by a husband and wife. Equally powerful is the revelation that only a handful of Stasi officials were ever punished for their actions, though Erich Mielke, the Stasi’s longtime chief, did spend time behind bars.

I visited Leipzig on Oct. 9 for the 25th anniversary Festival of Lights celebration of the Peaceful Revolution, the mass protests that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s eventual reunification. One target of protesters was Leipzig’s Stasi headquarters, where bureaucrats began to destroy sensitive material late in the fall of 1989. That building, with its distinctive semicircular facade, now houses both the Museum in the “Round Corner” and a branch of the Stasi Records Agency, where individuals and researchers can apply to see files.

The museum’s exhibition, “Stasi—Power and Banality,” is a disappointingly amateur effort—walls of old clippings and photos and display cases crammed with objects. Among the more curious are jars filled with cloths containing the preserved scents of suspects. An audio tour, available in English, makes some sense of the jumble.

The Stasi Records Agency offers an interesting detour. During Leipzig’s anniversary celebration, the agency threw open its archives. One room was crammed with translucent trash bags containing torn-up files. For years, workers painstakingly reassembled them. But Alexander Hartmann, an agency clerk, said that a computer program, still being perfected, is facilitating the process.

The agency remains understaffed, Mr. Hartmann said, so the wait to obtain a personal file can be as long as three years. Exceptions are made, he said, for applicants who are at least 75 years old, critically ill—or trying to rebut the charge of being a Stasi collaborator. Those cases, he said, jump to the head of the line.

The agency’s mission, as much as any of these exhibitions, attests to the continuing cultural tremors from Germany’s division. Mr. Hartmann said it reflected, too, the lessons learned from the aftermath of the Third Reich. “This time we want to do it right,” he said. “This time we want to process the past in a better way.”